Bolding Text in Discord: Markdown Syntax and Unicode Bold Explained

Discord is a chat platform used by people around the world. You can use emojis, reactions, and formatting (such as bold or italics) to make your messages stand out.

Discord doesn’t support traditional markdown like other platforms do. In this article, I’ll explain how to format text inside Discord message bodies using the bold syntax. We’ll also look at how you can add bold text to Discord usernames, nicknames, server names, channel names, role labels, status messages, bios, and voice channels. We’ll show you an online tool that creates these Unicode characters for you.

Bold Formatting

You might have noticed that Discord supports “Markdown,” a simple way to format text with symbols. For example, if you want to make your message bold, just wrap the text with two asterisks on each side:

I feel very strongly about this.

This will render as:

I feel very strongly about this.

The problem is that bold formatting isn’t supported in Discord’s fields outside of its message body. This includes things such as usernames, nicknames, server names, channel names, role labels, status messages, bios, and voice channel titles.

If you use bold syntax in any of those fields, you won’t see it rendered correctly. Instead, the * and * characters will appear literally. This means that users won’t see bolded text when they look up what roles exist within your server, or who your friends are, or who created which servers, etc.

Unicode Bold Characters

To get around this limitation, we’ve developed another approach. There are a number of Unicode blocks where bold, italic, script, and sans-serif versions of Latin alphabet and digits 0–9 are available.

Discord will treat these as plain text and render them as visually bold in any field that accepts text. These characters are known as the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols Unicode block. Here are some examples of these characters:

These Unicode characters work across a wide range of apps beyond Discord itself. They’re standard Unicode, so there’s no need for platform-specific settings. You’ll be able to type bolded text into your Twitter/X bio, TikTok bio, YouTube title, and Instagram bio — and more.

Creating Unicode Bold Characters

If you don’t want to type the Unicode characters manually, we’ve developed a free browser-based generator that produces Unicode bold characters for you. It’s entirely browser based, and you don’t need to create an account or install anything. Just point your browser to our site, type (or paste) your text, click the “Copy” button, then paste the result anywhere on Discord, and voilà!

You’ll notice that the output includes the original text as well as the bolded text; just copy the bolded text only. We’re continually adding more Unicode characters, so if you want something specific, send us a note at jieyi@jwz.org.uk.

We’ll be sure to update this page if and when bolding capabilities are added inside of Discord itself.